Does the app loading time increase when using a custom component library with many deployed versions?

💬 App Building
1
  1. I have a custom component library with many deployed versions. Does the app loading speed will increase when I deployed new library version using retool-ccl ?
  2. When I create a component library for different applications, should I put all components into a single library or create multiple libraries? Which option is preferable in terms of performance?
3

Hey @MChuduk! Thanks for reaching out and for your patience.

I encourage you to check out the "Network" tab in your browser's dev tools when loading up an app that includes custom components, as it's pretty enlightening.

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You can see that there are a few different requests fired off:

  • customComponentCollections: returns information about all libraries defined in the org
  • components.css: returns the CSS for a single custom component rendered on the canvas
  • components.js: returns the JS for a single custom component rendered on the canvas
  • retool-custom-component-manifest.json: returns a brief description of every component defined in a single library

Generally speaking, the number of deployed versions shouldn't have any performance impact and it might be slightly preferable to pool your components into a single library. Up to a point, at least.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

4

Okay, all of that makes sense. But I also noticed that my application loads faster when I switch to the deployed version of the custom components library instead of using it in development mode. Does that make sense?

5

That's to be expected, at least to some extent! In dev mode, the IDE is continuously "listening" for new library revisions in order to update components in real time. Deployed versions are essentially static releases.

6

Got it. In your opinion, is it better to build the entire page as a single custom component, or to use separate custom components and place them onto the canvas inside Retool?

7

I'd probably tend towards building a single component that encapsulates all the functionality that you want to implement, unless you need to break it up across multiple apps or make certain pieces of it more modular.